TresSugar

Three-Day Roundup Rescues 47 Children From Prostitution

LibertySugar — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:00:31 -0700

Federal, state, and local agents in 29 US cities recently joined forces to uproot 12 child-prostitution rings. The three-day operation was part of a larger five-year plan to stop sex trafficking of children. Minor sex trafficking is on the rise as the Internet has created a market for underage sex workers.

Forty-seven children were rescued, and a total of 642 people were arrested, including 73 pimps and 575 adult prostitutes. Apparently police took in no "johns."

The Department of Justice estimates that 293,000 youth in America are at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. The at-risk children come from abusive homes, or have run from or been abandoned by their families. Others children might end up in the situation after abduction, pressure from parents, or deceptive agreements between families and traffickers.

Now that these 47 children have been rescued, let's hope an effective healing process can begin. Do you think it's fair to treat prostitutes as victims when they're minors, but criminals after they turn 18?

Source

304,000 US Prisoners Eligible For Deportation

LibertySugar — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:00:09 -0700

304,000 criminals sitting in US jails are eligible for deportation. The problem? It will cost $2 billion a year to find them and deport them. Immigrant convicts, whether legal or illegal, must serve out their sentences in the US before they are deported.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to find a way to streamline the process. By connecting the FBI's records with antiterrorism and immigration records of the Homeland Security Department, it believes that state, county, and federal prisons will have an easier time identifying and deporting immigrants convicted of the most serious crimes. Immigration lawyers worry that untrained law enforcement officers may get a little deportation happy and focus on immigrants who committed minor violations that do not warrant deportation. Why is it so complicated? To find out, read more.

An elaborate maze of bureaucracies makes it easy for dangerous individuals to remain in the US. Think of all the parties involved: counties, states, the FBI, Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the municipal, state, and federal courts. Having too many departments may actually hinder them from carrying out their purpose!

According to these figures, it costs about $7,000 for each criminal deportation. Plus think of the cost of making sure they serve the punishments before sending them back. Do you think this is money well spent? Is it important to you to make sure dangerous illegal immigrants are sent packing?

Source

Is FBI Listening To All Conversations?

GiggleSugar — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:30:00 -0700

Even when your cell phone's off?! This is Fox News, so take it with a grain of salt. Apparently, the FBI can activate the microphone part of your cell, so even when you're not talking on the phone, They Can Hear You. The only way to avoid it is to take the battery out. Hey, go for it guys. Listen to your heart's content about my sucky love life, the two-for-one sale at H & M, or which brand of Nacho cheese sauce is the best. (For the record, it's Rico.)

Immigrants the New Slave Labor? FBI Probes Treatment

LibertySugar — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:00:31 -0800

Mexican guest workers at the center of an FBI investigation say that their boss treated them like animals.

Charles "Bimbo" Relan, the Louisiana farmer who employs the immigrants, allegedly confiscated the workers' passports, kept them working hunched over for hours, fired his shot gun over the workers' heads, killed the stray dog the workers kept as a pet, and sometimes paid them only $2 an hour. He also exposed the immigrants to dangerous pesticides.

Some of the immigrants, who had obtained visas to legally work on the strawberry farm, left without their passports. They organized, protested, and caught the FBI's attention. Do you think more should be done to make sure non-American workers are treated with dignity and have the same civil rights as American workers?

Source

Do You Believe in Women's Intuition?

TresSugar — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:00:00 -0700

If you've ever been to the UC Berkeley campus, you'll understand when I say that it takes a lot for someone to stand out as weird. But for female police officers Allison Jacobs and Lisa Campbell, something was off about Phillip Garrido, and thanks to their intuition and further probing, an 18-year-old missing person case was finally solved. The FBI and family of Jaycee Lee Dugard would know what happened 18 years ago to the 11-year-old who Garrido kidnapped right in front of her stepfather's eyes.

In an interview on CCN’s AC360, Lisa Campbell, a special events manager for the university police, said that Garrido, accompanied by two girls, approached her and asked about holding an event on campus. "[T]here was just something about the girls that wasn't right," she said.

Campbell did a background check on Garrido, which revealed that he was on parole after a rape conviction and was a registered sex offender. She asked officer Allison Jacobs to sit in on the meeting with her. Jacobs seconded Campbell’s hunch with her own suspicions about Garrido, calling it “police intuition” and then “a mother’s intuition.” After a call to Garrido’s parole officer, Campbell and Jacobs learned something chilling: “He doesn’t have daughters,” Jacobs recalls him saying. A meeting was set up the next day with Garrido's parole officer and finally, Garrido was arrested and 29-year-old Jaycee Dugard (he called her "Allissa") and her two daughters were finally free of his insane grip.

Do you think it's just a coincidence that female police officers noticed something funny about Garrido that even his parole officer and others who dealt with him didn't sense? Granted, they saw the girls his parole officer didn't, but others who met Garrido with these girls didn't suspect anything. Do you believe in women's intuition?

30 Percent Increase in Women Getting DUIs

TresSugar — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:00:00 -0700

Although men still outnumber women in drunk driving arrests by four to one, a report by the FBI for the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission shows that in the decade ending 2007, there has been a 30 percent increase in women getting arrested for driving while intoxicated.

Are women under more pressure for being the sole breadwinner in a he-cession? Are television shows encouraging them to drink more? Does motherhood drive them to drink? Maybe we'll see more PSAs about women and drinking, especially after the horrific accident recently in which a woman who was found later to have been drunk, drove her minivan the wrong way down a freeway, crashing into an SUV and killing eight people.

Laura Dean-Moody, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and a widow because a drunk driver killed her husband in 1991, thinks there should be stricter enforcement of drunk driving laws. More than 2 million drivers who have multiple DUI convictions will be on the road this upcoming Labor Day weekend. Moody doesn't think they should be able to keep their licenses: "These are people who have proven not once, not twice but three times that they are not worthy of the public's trust when it comes to operating a vehicle."

Should people with multiple DUI convictions lose their driver's licenses? Why do you think there's an increase in women and DUIs?

Click on Fake Child Porn Ads Head to the Clinker - Fair?

CitizenSugar — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:01:03 -0700

Think of it as RickRolling meets To Catch a Predator. The FBI now puts fake links to child porn on message boards, and then arrests people who click on them.

The tactic has been used to convict people in various states already. Since authorities use IP addresses to track clicks, defendants have argued that neighbors (or anybody!) could have tried to access the nonexistent illegal smut.

After clicking on one of these links, a PhD student had his door kicked in, and he was thrown to the floor and handcuffed by FBI agents. He's now facing charges.

Attempts to download child porn are punishable by 10 years in prison. Do you think this is a good way to catch these predators?

Source

Matthew Shepard's Mom: Hate Crimes Bill Is Necessary

TresSugar — Sun, 03 May 2009 03:00:00 -0700

"I hear that argument all the time: special rights for special people. It's not even the point. What this does is bring us up to a level of equality in prosecution . . . Personal bias in officers and prosecution is absolutely indicative of what's going to happen sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. And we need the vehicle to be able to address it somehow. And the crimes that are committed as hate crimes? They're meant to send a message to a community, not to an individual. It's a totally different type of crime."

-Judy Shepard on The Rachel Maddow Show. She was asked how she would respond to those who think that the justice department shouldn't get involved in hate crimes or that those protected under hate-crime laws are being "privileged" over victims of violent crimes that weren't committed because of bias. Shepard also responded to North Carolina Republican representative Virginia Foxx's claim that Shepard's son Matthew wasn't killed because he was gay.

To watch the video to find out what the bill that may become a law actually does, read more.

The Matthew Shepard Act (officially, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007, or LLEHCPA) expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. The bill also:

Removes the current prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity, like voting or going to school
Gives federal authorities greater ability to engage in hate crimes investigations that local authorities choose not to pursue
Provides $10 million in funding for 2008 and 2009 to help state and local agencies pay for investigating and prosecuting hate crimes
Requires the FBI to track statistics on hate crimes against transgender people (statistics for the other groups are already tracked)

Source

Details Emerge After Gov. Blagojevich's Arrest

LibertySugar — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:30:03 -0800

New details have emerged since FBI agents arrested Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich today on federal corruption charges alleging that he tried to sell Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat.

The FBI affidavit filed in District Court quotes Blagojevich as explaining that the vacant seat "is a f**king valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing." On Nov. 11 Blagojevich said that he didn't care that Obama wanted Valerie Jarrett, a longtime confidante, to succeed him, because "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. F**k them."
When the FBI called Blagojevich this morning to tell him they were coming to arrest him, he asked: "Is this a joke?"
US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who conducted this investigation along with the Valerie Plame investigation, said at a press conference today: "Gov. Blagojevich has taken us to a new low. This conduct would make [Abraham] Lincoln roll over in his grave."
The Chicago Tribune delayed running its independent investigation of Blagojevich for misconduct, after prosecutors asked them to wait, or risk jeopardizing the criminal investigation. The editor explained that the paper's "interest in reporting the news flows from its larger obligation of citizenship in a democracy."
As for the Obama seat, Blagojevich still has the authority to fill it, but the US Senate could always reject his choice. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin has asked the Illinois state legislature to call for a special election to fill Obama's seat, saying that no appointment by Blagojevich would be credible.

Source

Week in Weird News: Sarkozy Tells Obama to Kiss Like French

CitizenSugar — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:00:28 -0700

Sarkozy Teaches Obama How to French Kiss - President Obama accepted the typical French greeting of cheek kisses from a French student on Friday, after President Sarkozy encouraged him to accept the gesture.
Woman Kicks Cleaning Husband to the Curb - A woman in Germany divorced her husband because he cleaned too much.
Obama Is the New Colonel - Two fried chicken restaurants in New York City have taken some heat for putting Obama's name on their signs. One city councilman plans demonstrations next week outside of Obama Fried Chicken and Obama Fried Chicken & Pizza.
Workers Find Live Grenade in Texas Attic - Roofers in Texas found a live World War II-era grenade in an attic this week. An FBI bomb technician was called in and the grenade was detonated at a nearby shooting range.
Rocket Fuel Chemical Found in Baby Formula – Samples of powered infant formula contain traces of a chemical used in rocket fuel, according to a new government study.
Israel's Female Leaders Erased From Photos - Ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers in Israel Photoshopped two female Israeli cabinet members out of a printed photo, because it is improper to print images of women.

Source